This might be an unpopular or controversial opinion in current fandom, but I really love killing goblins -- or orcs, or kobolds, or any other stock enemy meant to die in droves. it hit me last night when I was playing Torchlight 3 (which is a video game and not a D&D one, but bear with me). The goblins in that game are very much the murderous, pyromaniac lit psychos of Pathfinder pre-2E and the feeling of obliterating them on screen filled me with a nostalgia for doing so at the table with dice in one hand and a cold brew in the other. There's just something truly satisfying about the over the top, silly mass murder of enemies designed specifically to die in droves.
I am not saying that is all I want out of D&D, or that I have an issue with a table or a game treating some traditional stock enemy types as not-stock enemy types (except Nazis -- Nazis should always be stock enemy types). I am just saying that killing goblins by the score is FUN.
That stuff
is fun. But it's also the case that the last few decades of modern fantasy have humanized orcs, goblins, kobolds, ogres, and other traditional D&D humanoids to an extraordinary degree. And frankly, I'm okay with that. Elder Scrolls orcs and Warcraft goblins are
cool. Shrek is a decent bloke. Even the good Professor Tolkien ultimately decided that orcs had moral agency, and that somewhere there must have been at least
some orcs somewhere siding with the Free Peoples and fighting against the Enemy in the War of the Ring. I'm too much of a Tolkien stan to ever argue with
the Professor.
So at some point (years back), my campaigns naturally drifted away from treating orcs and goblins as soulless demons cloaked in mortal flesh that only deserve a quick death because they're a stain on the natural order… and I imported or invented whole
new monsters which are definitionally soulless demons cloaked in mortal flesh that only deserve a quick death because they're a stain on the natural order. I use beastmen (inspired by a variety of sources — skaven from Warhammer, broo from Glorantha, trollocs from Wheel of Time) as my "Chaos-created cannon-fodder" du jour.
After all, orcs are cool. They're mean, they're green, they're betuskèd, they're bros. (And orcesses look like Shulkie!) But a horrible monstrous
swine-man with glowing red eyes and no soul or language or culture bearing down on you with some jagged-edged iron blade that it got from the night mare mounted spectre in charge of the local divison of the Dark Lord's Chaos-Army? Quick, kill it with axes, kill it with bullets, kill it with magical fire!